Greatest
War Films:War films acknowledge
the horror and heartbreak of war, letting the actual combat
fighting or conflict (against nations or humankind) provide
the primary plot or background for the action of the film.
There are a significant number of influential, important, and
milestone war films throughout cinematic history, outlined
here, and each with a few screenshots and the title screen
from the opening credits.

Typical
elements in the action-oriented war plots include POW camp experiences and
escapes, historical recreations of major battles or war-related events, submarine warfare, spy or espionage tales, personal heroism, biopics of important war figures, "war is hell" brutalities,
air dogfights, tough trench/infantry experiences, resistance movements, pre-war intrigue, veterans returning to the homeland, male-bonding buddy adventures
during wartime - even black comedies about warfare.

Themes explored in these war films include combat,
survivor and escape stories, tales of gallant sacrifice and
struggle, studies of the futility and inhumanity of battle,
the effects of war on society, and intelligent and profound
explorations of the moral and human issues.

In the recent 2014 book War on the Silver
Screen,
it was stated that more films have been made about World War
II than about any other armed hostility in American history.

In 2007, Military History Magazine
created a special collector's edition highlighting their
selection of the 100 Greatest War Movies, a critical
guide to the best war films of all time, chronologically
covering war films from Battleship Potemkin (1925) to Letters
From Iwo Jima (2006), as this list does. The magazine
wrote that "the movies that made the cut cover a full
spectrum of life during wartime, were made by filmmakers
around the globe and span the history of war from ancient
days to now..." Almost all the films dealt with wars
and battles of American involvement since the Civil War,
and a vast majority of them dealt with World War II. Some
of their films probably shouldn't have been on list: The
Third Man (1949) for instance, was a political
thriller rather than a war movie. Hitchcock's Notorious
(1946), John Huston's The
African Queen (1951) and The Man Who Would Be
King (1975), John Ford's The
Searchers (1956) and William Wyler's Ben-Hur
(1959) were also not typical war movies. John Wayne's The
Alamo (1960) was not a great film. Besides having ranking
issues (ranking films of this sort seems to be a fruitless
effort), the Military History magazine's list was
a very comprehensive and detailed compilation.

A few films that were not in the Military History list (and included in this list, in part) were: The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), In Which We Serve (1942, UK), Destination Tokyo (1943), The Lost Patrol (1943), Back to Bataan (1944), The Fighting Sullivans (1944), Objective, Burma! (1945), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Halls of Montezuma (1950), Flying Leathernecks (1951), Battle Cry (1955), Mister Roberts (1955), The Young Lions (1958), Sink the Bismarck (1960), Hell is for Heroes (1962), Battle of the Bulge (1965), Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff (1965), In Harm's Way (1965), The Blue Max (1966), Closely Watched Trains (1966, Czech.), The Sand Pebbles (1966), Where Eagles Dare (1968), The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Catch-22 (1970), Kelly's Heroes (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), The Boys in Company C (1977), MacArthur (1977), Coming Home (1978), Force 10 From Navarone (1978), Go Tell the Spartans (1978), Gallipoli (1981, Austr.), First Blood (1982), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Casualties of War (1989), Henry V (1989), Heaven and Earth (1993), Richard III (1995), Courage Under Fire (1996), Starship Troopers (1997), Three Kings (1999), Enemy at the Gates (2001), Tigerland (2000), The Pianist (2002), We Were Soldiers (2002), and Jarhead (2005).

Note: The films that
are marked with a yellow star are the films that Greatest
Films has selected as the "100
Greatest Films".

Highest
Ranking War Movies(in chronological order)

Battleship
Potemkin (1925) -
has regularly appeared in the top 10 of every Sight
& Sound polling, also voted
the greatest film ever by a panel of experts at the 1958
Brussels World's Fair.